WONDER Virtual Reception and Artists Talks | February 29, 5 pm MT
Please join us for this virtual reception and artist talk with the award winners for the exhibition Wonder.
Juror’s Award: Dominique Muñoz
Juror’s Honorable Mentions: WPA: René West and Mark Penland, Roxanne Huber, Dawnja Burris
Director’s Award: Jason DeMarte
Director’s Honorable Mentions: Epiphany Couch, Dominque Muñoz, Mitchell Squire
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Dominique Muñoz
My photographs are grounded in environments reminiscent of my childhood memories, supercharged with imagination. In my current body of work, I deconstruct photographs to collage them together, transforming them into photographic objects. Strips of inkjet paper weave in and out of each other creating masks and wallpaper.
Portraits are concealed with textures from my childhood. I illuminate textiles, creating photographic prints that I treat as thread. These textiles are linked to my Guatemalan ancestry, channeling the matriarchs who raised me.
Through my paper weavings, I obscure my portraits with masks which exist on a pendulum of visibility. They allow the wearer to conceal their identity while simultaneously enacting a new persona. The threads of my masks extend beyond the canvas, challenging the borders of the self. This disruption invites viewers to open the vessels of their own identities. My work explores themes of family, memory, and the mysticism of my Mesoamerican ancestors.
Jason DeMarte
My work examines a contemporary consumer existence through sublime tableaus of apathy. I'm interested in creating visually seductive landscapes with narratives of post-capitalist tensions. Through hypothetical dystopias, a rearranging of the natural order emerges from the ashes of our inconspicuous consumption, where nature, much like our commercial environments, has been impregnated with the detritus of marketing, consumption, and waste. Landscapes pop with carefully designed visual gluttony that attempts to compete with our limitless capacity to consume. Animals appear perfectly apathetic in overly adorned false environments, surrendering to the inevitability of what's to come.
I work photographically to tap into the medium's ability to reflect truth, and much like commercial photography, I see the work as a kind of nonsensical sales pitch, a seduction of false promise, where nature has succumbed to relentless marketing. By using the same methods as commercial photographers, I elevate seemingly ordinary, dull flora and fauna to the commercial stage where we understand and treat nature like the material world we surround ourselves with. In an age where truth is irrelevant, hyperfocus, artificial lighting, and scale are used to exaggerate facts. My process ultimately aims to embrace a manipulation of truth by hyper-exaggerating the ordinary to mirror the sublime apathy of our modern existence.
Dawnja Burris
During the heyday of taxidermy in the late Victorian era, natural history museums commissioned numerous expeditions to acquire animal specimens for catalog and display. Additional to hunters, technicians and researchers, artists accompanied the team observing and creating renderings to include in the immersive environments of the museum diorama.
Images in this series evidence the reaction of wonderment and awe often experienced in the encounter with the meticulously fabricated scenes and re-animated animals within the diorama. Through the superimposition of archival photos from the American Museum of Natural History in New York City taken during the dioramas' creation, a resulting composite seeks to bring forth a dimension of the original construction not seen. Visualizing this aspect of the embedded past seeks to reveal the operations concealed in current day display and to acknowledge the long lineage of artistic and social convention present within this early form of virtual reality.
Epiphany Couch
Stories are community knowledge. What one person learns, becomes a lesson for all. My work centers around what truths a story can teach us. By recontextualizing classic mediums such as bookmaking, beading, photography, and collage, I look to present new ways through which we can examine our pasts, the natural world, and the complexities of identity and community.
My work often feels out of place in a culture that prioritizes individualism and self-reliance. In a sense, the work I create challenges this notion and instead presents a space that honors collective knowledge and the value of existing in community. My work is unapologetically personal, drawing from family stories, my childhood experience, archival research, and my own dreams.
I utilize a multidisciplinary approach to create images and sculptural works that hold space for reflection, transforming from mere things into precious objects - intimate and heirloom-like.
Couch is spuyal pabs (Puyallup), Yakama, and Scandinavian and grew up in cal ali (Tacoma, Washington). She earned her BFA in Sculpture with a minor in Asian Studies from The University of Puget Sound. Her work has
been shown at Carnation Contemporary in Portland OR, Gallery Ost in New York NY, and Yuan Ru Gallery in Bellevue WA, among others. In 2022 and 2023 she received the Jurors Choice Award for her works included in the Around Oregon Biennial at The Arts Center in Corvallis, Oregon. She lives and works in Portland, Oregon.
Roxanne Huber
Mother: loving in the passage of time.
This composition of photographs is a visual presentation of an ineffable feeling.
When I slow down and connect with my children, I become more conscious of our ephemerality.
In those moments I experience a collision of the present and time passing.
I am overcome with a love for what is, while grieving the loss of what is still right in front of me.
Motherhood is living in that constant convergence of love and loss,awe and grief, gratitude and fear while learning how to surrender to the inevitable; loving in the passage of time.
WPA: Rene West, Mark Penland
Poetic Science
In this body of work, we are questioning our past, present, and future relationship with technology. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is among the newest technologies redefining our world. We have chosen AI as a partner in this adventure, creating large-scale tableaus from multiple images generated from natural language descriptions.
Creating visual images with words is like writing poetry, except that our AI partner sometimes hallucinates.
Embracing chance has long been an aspect of our practice, and we find these computational inventions charming. The technology is in its infancy, still naïve and learning. It hides hands like a beginning art student or when hands are included they look like sausages and sport extra digits. Sometimes the knees bend in impossible ways or the arms have too many elbows. While it makes plenty of mistakes, it can also produce accurate portraits of historical figures, specific locations, time periods, and even modern superheroes.
Photography has always adapted to the evolving technologies of the day, and generative AI is the current extension of the craft.
The title of this project was taken from the early history of computers and is a reference to Ada Lovelace. In 1843, Lovelace published what is considered by many to be the first computer program, an algorithm for the Analytical Engine. She referred to her scientific approach as poetic science, a blend of mathematics and imagination. In her publications, she predicted machines that would compose music and create graphics. We like the historical significance of this term and the way it describes our relationship with art and technology.
The WPA is an artistic collaboration between Mark Penland and René West. Both of us have created collages since we could hold a pair of scissors. Collectively we are fluent in photography, digital imaging, and mixed media. By working with juxtaposition, narrative, and ambiguity we create visual metaphors in a wide variety of mediums.
Mitchell Squire
At so critical a time for photography as now, I can't help but wonder why there STILL aren't enough imaginative and provocative images about what being a senior Black man means and how a so-called Black "elder" might be pictured in ways other than the stereotypical: such as a cool Samuel L. Jackson type OG or a gray-templed retiree in a pharmaceutical commercial, and especially as one who must "hold it down" for those who might seek his wisdom.
Inasmuch as a Black man of any age could still easily be murdered by police while innocently sleeping in the privacy of his home as he could in public before the eyes of the nation while a brutal knee compresses the life out of him; or whose chances of being spared by a raging pandemic or other atrocity are slimmer than most; or for whom each day holds the distinct possibility that he might not see another sky or feel free enough to take the time to look up at it in wonderment, the mythical stereotypes must fall. We live with equal uncertainty and precariousness, but it seems no one knows what that looks like for us. But we dream, we show out, we resist,and we still test our limits.
The confluence of crises in 2020 put me in a frame of mind to question whether I had fully engaged this life and whether the pleasure and joy of being me needed to be writ large in everything I do. So, I began to answer how a 60+ year old man might live increasingly unmeasured, uncensored, ungovernable, and carried along by the flow as he had never been. I took to grassy fields, muddy creek beds, woods, the darkness of my dilapidated shed, and even the snow-covered plains to make self portraits which might reveal to the world more clearly how I inhabit myself inside a world which otherwise misrepresents or ignores me. The reliquary of visual noise I created amplified my anarchy, my revolution to feel, to continually craft a presence drawn deeply into this earth by a different field of gravity.
Now 4 years later, I haven't stopped.
